Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.

All men are equal before fish.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.

The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.

The utmost extent of man’s knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

What was God doing before the divine creation?

The brain is wider than the sky.

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

History should be written as philosophy.

Non-violence is the article of faith.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.

If you understand the universe, you control it, in a way.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Philosophy is the highest music.

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes… and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

Philosophy begins in wonder.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self.

Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

If I err in belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error which gives me pleasure to be wrested from me while I live.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.

If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.

States are not moral agents.